KAWC Colorado River Public Media

KAWC is dedicated to educating, informing, and entertaining our listeners through high-quality radio and internet broadcasts. We serve the diverse needs of our audience with music, news, public affairs, and fine arts programming.

Challenge

KAWC was looking for a cloud-based, all-in-one donor management system with intuitive communication and reporting functionality. “Here were the critical decision points: ease of use for a variety of skill levels on the team, cloud-based access for remote work, ability to run communications (email newsletters, letters, etc.) through the system rather than maintain a separate platform, intuitive reporting,” said Alice Ferris, Development Director at KAWC.

Solution

In addition to a clean interface, Alice and the team were happy to find an affordable solution in Bloomerang with a smooth implementation process. In the beginning, these benefits drew them to Bloomerang: “the cost was definitely a factor, the clean interface was important for our less techy people, and we liked that the conversion process seemed to be very supported.” But since using Bloomerang they’ve come to appreciate its feature-set and functionality. “Over the time that we’ve used Bloomerang, we’ve come to value the ease of data entry, ability to run communications through the system, and easy reporting.”

One of Alice’s favorite features within Bloomerang is something small and specific but packs a punch in their development process: the BCC function. “I love the bcc function. I know that’s really nerdy. I like that all of my communications with a donor can be added to the constituent’s timeline without me even really thinking about it — no need for call reports about emails! I also use notes and interactions a lot to track how we’re communicating with donors.”

Results

Since implementing Bloomerang, KAWC has been able to alleviate several fundraising pain points around reporting and constituent communications. “Reporting and queries [are] so much easier! Also, newsletters and acknowledgements are a lot easier.” In addition to its intuitive communication feature-set, the team at KAWC has also benefited from the customization they’ve been able to do with the email tool. “Open rates on newsletters have improved with customization that we can do in Bloomerang.”

KAWC has also benefited from better (and more organized) donor data. “Donor information accuracy (such as mailing addresses and emails) is up. I also feel like our communications are much more customized.”

All in all, it’s amazing what an intuitive, relationship-focused database can do for the growth of an organization such as KAWC. “It’s easy to use for a variety of skill levels, has good customer service, and the price is very value-focused.”